Generic Company Place Holder RegScanner (64-bit version)

I usually look at software which provides functions already
included in Windows the way I look at bottled water--why pay for
what you already get for free? A program which overlaps with
built-in functionality has to do a lot more to be worth the price.
Of course, it helps if the price is "free," and RegScanner hits
this mark, as well as providing notably enhanced functionality over
RegEdit. This registry scanner doesn't replace RegEdit, but it
makes it easier and faster to get into your Windows Registry.

RegScanner lives up to its name: It scans the Registry, but it
doesn't give you any power to edit it. (Though it will fire up
RegEdit when you've found the keys you seek.) While RegEdit gives
you "free and barely worth it" tools to find a particular key,
RegScanner gives you a "worth paying for, even though it's free"
set of features. To start with, RegScanner shows you all found keys
at once, rather than forcing you to single-step through found items
in the Registry tree. It allows you to filter by data type, to pick
any base key, to search for keys added or modified only within a
given date (helpful for some security purposes, if you suspect
something has been changing keys but you're not sure which ones),
and so on. Once the list is complete, you can export all or some of
them, create an HTML report, or double-click an entry to open
RegEdit for that key.

There are some drawbacks to RegScanner. The "Help" menu item
merely displays an "About" box, and double-clicking the .chm file
causes an error. If you accidently use the 32-bit version on a
64-bit computer, as I did, you may experience extremely bizarre
(albeit non-destructive) behavior--on my system, it locked into a
recursive loop in which it kept appending a key to itself. This
error did not manifest when I tried an identical search with the
64-bit version. And of course, if you are unfamiliar with the
Registry or don't know why you'd want to scan it, this program
probably isn't for you.

Several years ago, I had to find and fix a complex
registry-related bug. If I'd had this program instead of just
RegEdit, I could have fixed the problem in half the time. That's
about as strong a recommendation as I can make.

Note: This software comes in 32-bit and 64-bit versions.
This is the 64-bit version, which is for 64-bit PCs running a
64-bit OS. If your PC is running a different supported OS, please
download the
32-bit version instead.

--Ian Harac

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